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Wednesday, 17 April 2013

In my last post here I was asking for gardening advice. Some of you had some great suggestions! I think I've worked out what the problem was, and I hope I've fixed it.The soil was very sense and tough, which is a common problem in pots; it needed to be dug over and aerated. Unfortunately it would have been very difficult to do that with the tiny little plants in the pot. I did manage to save the largest silverbeet plant, which hopefully will take off now. One silverbeet plant that I had to dig out and add to my compost (never easy for me! I love all my plants!) was only two centimetres tall but had roots close to thirty centimetres long, so obviously the plants in that pot were trying very hard, they just couldn't take hold. I've since planted some radishes and calendula seeds in the tub. The radishes have already sprouted and seem to be growing a little every day so I think I have solved the problem. The tub now looks like this:

And my darling little radishes look like this:

The main problem I had with my last lot of seedlings was transplant shock, so to avoid that I've decided to put my Autumn nursery in peat pots and egg cartons.

That egg carton at the front there has lettuce seeds in it. I've put them in an egg carton and not a peat pot so I will have to do less thinning out later; when the little lettuces appear, I will simply plant the entire egg carton in one of my garden tubs, just as I would a peat pot, but longer.
That big round plastic pot there has/had a potato plant in it that I found in my compost bin. Having had a dig around, I have my suspicions that the plant rotted in the rain. I would still quite like to grow potatoes, please, so just in case I planted some more.
I checked the one potato in my pantry for eyes. One eye! Plenty! I cut a small slice of potato with the eye on it and planted that in the pot. It should be sufficient to grow a new plant.

Worst thing that can happen is I'm no worse off than I am now.
The other plants in my garden are all doing quite well. Here's pictures of all of them which I expect you to look at and enjoy as if I were showing you a cute thing my baby did...

For those playing along at home, that's two kinds of tomatoes, chillis and strawberries. No fruit on the strawberries yet, but since I thought it was dead for a while there that's ok. The first few years are always rubbish for a strawberry plant, anyhow.
The herb garden is also going well but looks a bit stragly, so I'm not going to show you any pictures of it, much like it's my baby and it just farted or something.